Sara Gillespie and Friends: Part 1

ORAL HISTORY OF SARA GILLESPIE, AILEEN BENNETT, AND BETTY CHRISTIE
Interviewed by Dennis Kiley
March 19, 1999
MR. KILEY: This is Dennis Kiley, it’s March 19, 1999, and I’m here at the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the opening of the gates in Oak Ridge at the American Museum of Science and Energy. And if you ladies would be so kind as to introduce yourselves, from left to right please.
MRS. CHRISTIE: Betty Ridings Christie
MRS. BENNETT: Aileen Ridings Bennett
MRS. GILLESPIE: Sara Boyd Gillespie
MR. KILEY: Actually, you might want to start by talking about how you came to Oak Ridge. What was it – because of family work? Why and when did you first come to Oak Ridge.
MRS. CHRISTIE: Well, our dad was a construction worker and worked all around, and this big project was going to start. They took his application off a running board of a car in Knoxville in November of 1942. That’s how come us to be here.
MRS. BENNETT: And he was the second carpenter hired for this project out here. And there were seven – nine of us including our parents, and as she said, we had to move to Clinton because we didn’t have a house in Oak Ridge. Then as she said she worked for USED [United States Engineering Detachment] and she got us a house to live in in Oak Ridge. When we first moved here we lived in a B house, and there were 13 of us in that B house, and that was real interesting.
MR. KILEY: Sara?
MRS. GILLESPIE: Well my dad worked for the Milan Arsenal, which is in West Tennessee and things were pretty slow - five children. He and his brother heard about the work in Oak Ridge so they decided to come up here in the spring of ’44. He thought it was a good place and a good time to move us so he moved us up. We arrived August 30, 1944 with no beds, no furniture. The neighbors helped us with blankets and we slept on the floor that night. It was nice and warm. A good thing was we moved into a flattop that was already built, and the next morning we saw our neighbors’ houses being built, because they came in on flatbed trucks, 1/3 of the house at a time - with the shower curtain already hanging. My youngest sister was 8 months old and I was 12, and that’s how we got here. Came to Rockwood on the train, got off the train, my dad had a car to meet us there and we came to the gates, finally got in and got settled late at night.
MR. KILEY: So how did you get your family on in Oak Ridge from living in the house in Clinton, how did that go?
MRS. BENNETT: I’m sure daddy got a truck.
MRS. CHRISTIE: Daddy always moved us, he just got a truck. We came over; my aunt brought all of us over to the house he had rented that night. We stopped between Loudon and Oak Ridge and asked directions from some man that gave us directions to go to Chattanooga. We did finally get here though.
MRS. BENNETT: But I remember stopping at the overlook, remember - stopping there, we got out and looked and you could just see all of Oak Ridge.
MRS. CHRISTIE: Because it was busy then, they were working 24 hours a day, they didn’t close. And it was real busy and lights were on all over
MR. KILEY: So when your family first came here you were living in Clinton but then because you had a job here you were able to get – how did you go about getting family accommodations here in Oak Ridge?
MRS. BENNETT: Going thru the Captain?
MR. KILEY: Yes.
MRS. BENNETT: Well, as I say, five people working in the same family on this project. And it was just a drop in the bucket because of all the people that were here. But five people was five people. And he just explained to the housing director that there were five people that he was going to lose if we couldn’t find suitable housing because there was nothing to rent – absolutely nothing. So I guess he bent the rules a little bit and we got in. Because construction workers didn’t – they were not eligible for the housing. I had a brother in law who was in the service and that helped matters a lot.
MR. KILEY: So the first dwelling that you went to was --
MRS. CHRISTIE: A “B” house
MR. KILEY: A “B” house, was that big enough for all of you?
MRS. CHRISTIE: Not for thirteen people, it wasn’t. So I went back to him and told him, and I told him, look there’s thirteen of us and this house is just a bit small. So we went back to the housing director and he put us in a bigger house. And we had several people live with us even after we moved into the bigger house. My cousin lived with us for quite some time and you know, just relatives that--
MRS. BENNETT: Anybody that didn’t have a place to sleep.
MRS. CHRISTIE: Came to our house
MR. KILEY: What was it like living in a flat top, Sara? You mentioned that it was--
MRS. GILLESPIE: Well, actually to me it was pretty crude, but it served a purpose. There was no underpinning of the house when we first moved in, so my dad put some siding on the underpinning. I remember one time my sisters went under the house and smoked rabbit tobacco and my husband caught them with all this wooden stuff, everything was wooden. But anyway, it was a wonderful life growing up on East Drive. I moved there when I was 12, left when I was 17, and we could climb under the fence which completely surrounded Oak Ridge and we would see occasionally the man on horseback patrolling. There was a big train tunnel behind our house and we’ve been known to go inside the tunnel which we weren’t supposed to do. But go down in the woods and pick blackberries. Or go down in the woods and cut down a Christmas tree for that matter.
MRS. CHRISTIE: We used to go down “G” road and cut Christmas trees,
MRS. GILLESPIE: Right, and go down “G” Road where the houses, where the farmers used to live and beautiful flowers would bloom every season, and dig up flowers and take them back to our house. It was a wonderful place to grow up. Everything was free. My brother took free music lessons; he never owned the cello, but when he went to college he played cello; taught cello in fact. It was all because of all the training we got here. So different…
MRS. BENNETT: Excellent schools..
MRS. CHRISTIE: They tried to provide all the entertainment that any person could possibly want. They built bowling alleys, they had dances, and it was just a wonderful town to grow up in. Even though I was 18.
MRS. BENNETT: It was sad because of the war but Oak Ridge was just a wonderful place for a young person. Especially, there were no classes as far as financial or what have you. We were all here and we were all on the same level. It was just great. And I’ve said many times, that while other kids had security blankets, we had security guards. We felt very safe.
MRS. CHRISTIE: We did; we never locked the doors, you didn’t lock the doors. It wasn’t necessary.
MRS. BENNETT: And you could hear a lot of moms say, “don’t go off the area!”
MRS. GILLESPIE: You all were talking about the school system. My mother said she was so glad that they had the foresight to stay in Oak Ridge after they got here. And this is bragging, but it’s true – they didn’t have the money to send us through school, but they got such a wonderful background in school here, my brother and my sister both got their doctorates and everyone but me got at least a Master’s degree and all on their own, and just because of the background in Oak Ridge schools. When my husband first went to Oak Ridge High School once he said. “I couldn’t believe it. All the kids have a microscope.” And each of us didn’t have a microscope in Berea. And that’s true. Everything was furnished. They even painted the school rooms every year whether they needed it or not. And we had free recreation halls, free playgrounds, so it really added so much. It didn’t come out of my parent’s pocket; it came out of the government’s pocket to keep us happy. They say there was 700 PhDs living here and I’m sure out of 70,000 there were at one time. And they demanded good schools, good everything. So we had a bus service back then, 6 cents a token.
MRS. BENNETT: Right and all of our services as far as the coal bins which were just right outside our door. They would deliver coal.
MRS. CHRISTIE: and if anything happened at your house and you needed it repaired, you called.
MRS. GILLESPIE: Come change a light bulb at the very beginning. We were told to do that.
I remember I babysat for the Army, like the manager of Oak Ridge, but he was in the Army still before the Army left Oak Ridge. His name was Bill Bonnet and one night I was over there babysitting and my mother said, “Make sure you tell them that you can’t stay up, you can’t stay up late because you can’t stay awake.” Well they didn’t come home until about 2 in the morning and I was sound asleep. They couldn’t get in. He had on a white summer suit and he climbed into the coal bin to get in the door. We joked, but he didn’t do it again because I couldn’t wake up. But those were some of the fun things. Coal bins, and everybody had oil to burn in that stove in the middle of the room of the flattop. Seems like we went someplace to get five gallons of oil. And then we moved to a place where we burned coal and had a coal bin.
MRS. BENNETT: We had a fireplace in the den.
MRS. CHRISTIE: But after we were married we lived in a flat top and it had a potbellied stove sitting right in the living room. My husband, being from the north, he would put coal in you know, and leave the door open, and of course it would just burn, and you could see it. One morning he had gone to work and I looked out and the fire trucks were all parked in front of the house, you know, I got out looking to see where the fire was, and they never did find it, and it finally dawned on me. The flat top had a big window in the front; they could see my fire in that stove and somebody had called the fire trucks.
MR. KILEY: So you came, you were 18, already graduated from school, so you went to work, where did you work?
MRS. CHRISTIE: Here in Oak Ridge.
MR. KILEY: Where?
MRS. CHRISTIE: In the mail room, mail and records
MR. KILEY: And what part of the..
MRS. CHRISTIE: First I worked as a messenger, and then I worked in the file room and then I worked as head of the outgoing mail department.
MRS. BENNETT: What did USED stand for?
MRS. CHRISTIE: United States Engineering Detachment.
MRS. GILLESPIE: Were you working for the Army?
MRS. CHRISTIE: Not the Army, and I really don’t know how to explain it, but it was the Army part of this project. The engineering part.
MRS. GILLESPIE: And there were a lot of people who came here with the Army and stayed here.
MRS. CHRISTIE: Yes.
MRS. GILLESPIE: A lot of people met their husbands here too.
MR. KILEY: As young women here in Oak Ridge, what kinds of things did you do to entertain yourselves?
MRS. GILLESPIE: I belonged to the Girl Scouts, and they had so many recreation centers, and they had all kinds of courses that helped me a great deal.
MRS. CHRISTIE: They had dances on the tennis courts on Saturday nights, and they had dances at the--
MRS. GILLESPIE: Movies, bowling
MRS. BENNETT: And during the summer they had a recreational program at each school and the neighborhood kids participated and they were supervised and everything, and we had of course softball, and we would play against each other and other schools, there was just always something to do. They always had some program, something going on. We certainly couldn’t sit around the house and say we were bored. Everybody went to the swimming pool; that was THE place to go.
MRS. GILLESPIE: It was fed by a spring in the beginning, don’t know whether it still is or not. But it was back then.
MRS. BENNETT: But, of course, we had the Wildcats Den.
MRS. GILLESPIE: They didn’t deny us anything that we needed.
MR. KILEY: Wildcats?
MRS. BENNETT: Wildcats Den – it was a place in Jackson Square where all the high school kids got in. And we’d see how fast we could get from the school on the hill where we had how many steps to climb? To the high school.
MRS. BENNETT: We had lots of them. We’d see how fast we could get from the high school down to the Wildcats Den.
MRS. CHRISTIE: Jackson Square area used to be what we called Townsite and that was the hub of everything. And the central cafeteria was right in the center of it. It was open 24 hours a day and if you got off at 7 p.m. at night you could go over and have coffee, and there was always somebody over there you knew. Everybody found enough to do to keep them busy.
MRS. BENNETT: I remember the day after we moved here, my brother said, “Let’s walk to Townsite.” We lived up on Outer Drive. And it took us a while to get there, thru mud and snow, it had been snowing. We walked all the way down there. And I have to tell you something really funny. We had a nickel between us. And so we went into the grocery store – they had a grocery store at Jackson Square – he says, “What can we buy with this nickel?” So we went thru the store and looked, and we saw this cake of yogurt. And if you knew my brother, he was a practical joker of all times, he said, “Hey look at the big cake of candy or something.” And I said, “Yeah,” and it was a nickel or something. He said, “Here you can have the first bite.” I bit into that cake; it was a cake of yeast, not yogurt. But we walked all the way down there and all the way home. We walked a lot in Oak Ridge. Of course, we had bus service, but it seemed like--
MRS. CHRISTIE: It was easy to walk
MRS. GILLESPIE: You know something else we were not deprived of - concerts and that kind of thing. Estes Keefauver came here, I think it was in ’47, Senator Estes Keefauver. And anybody could go hear him that wanted to, and I remember because I was one of the ushers. My friend was one of the people who sponsored him, and so she asked me if I could please, usher at the high school, because everybody could find their own seat, but it was, but it showed us off in our evening gowns. But I also remember we had Sigmund Spaeth came here one time, very famous person in classical music. But we weren’t deprived of anything. In high school remember we had H. V. Kaltenborn who came here, and he was a very famous person. We need to talk about schools.
MR. KILEY: True.
MRS. GILLESPIE: Douglas Edwards’ mother was a teacher here, remember, Mrs. Edwards. He was as big as Tom Brokaw is now. Teachers came from all over the US. I’ve just done a study for our reunion where they came from and they came from every state. Actually more from other states than Tennessee. And they were some hand-picked and because they wanted the best. Absolutely fabulous teachers. Would compare on any college level. That has also leaked over to our athletic programs because in Oak Ridge we have feeder programs in the Boys Club and Girls Club and this is the reason we have won so many state championships.
MRS. CHRISTIE: I went to the first football game,
MR. KILEY: Who did they play?
MRS. CHRISTIE: Don’t even remember – that was so many years ago. An awful lot of mud, though.
MR. KILEY: Not much grass out there.
MRS. GILLESPIE: No, the streets weren’t even paved that well when we first came.
MRS. CHRISTIE: We had boardwalks, we didn’t have sidewalks.
MRS. GILLESPIE: The street also, there was some kind of first layer that you start putting down, my husband told me what it was, but in the very earliest years we did not have real heavy asphalt roads like they do now, cause it was so many to be put down and there was 70,000 plus when we were here. I guess it is about 30,000 now.
MRS. CHRISTIE: But the road that you came in on, Elza Gate, was not paved, and it was mud up to your knees.
MRS. BENNETT: Tell that story about your sister in law that came to visit.
MRS. CHRISTIE: Well, she came from Pennsylvania to visit, and as she stepped off the bus her foot went into the mud and she lost her shoe. She took the other one off and threw it.
MRS. GILLESPIE: Rosie Eby came with her daughter when her daughter was 3 and she got off the train, and we did not have a train station, they just stopped the train out there in the middle of nowhere, down at Elza Gate, and they got off the train. They just stopped it; we didn’t have a station until later.
MRS. CHRISTIE: We rode busses, and some of them were those you know where there are two, one hooked onto the back and we’d catch one at night and go into Knoxville to shop.
MRS. BENNETT: And we could not wait to get our badge; until we were old enough to get our badge.
MR. KILEY: That was a real important part of growing up.
MRS. BENNETT: Oh, yes, you went down there the day of your birthday to get your badge.
MR. KILEY: Kind of like getting your driver’s license.
MRS. BENNETT: Yes, it sure was and I remember our grandparents still lived in Lenoir City or Loudon and we’d go visit them, and naturally one of us would lose our badge or leave it there. So our mother would say, just act like you’re asleep because they’re not going to wake up a child to get thru the gates. So that’s how we got back in.
MR. KILEY: What was it like going thru the gates to leave or to come back? What kinds of things did you have to go through?
MRS. BENNETT: You just had to show your badge and they checked out your car and
MRS. GILLESPIE: If you had company, your dad or somebody had to be responsible to sign for them that he would be responsible, and they had no cameras, no guns, and no liquor, none of these things that you weren’t supposed to have. This was a dry county.
MRS. BENNETT: It sure was.
MRS. GILLESPIE: I mean, I happen to know a funny story and you may have heard it. All these people went to Knoxville and came back with baby bassinet loaded underneath the baby was all this liquor. And this is a true story.
MRS. BENNETT: And the famous white house outside Oliver Springs gate, remember that, that little white house; that’s where everybody went to get their booze, I’m told.
MRS. GILLESPIE: A lot of people didn’t bother them that this was a dry county. Lots of funny stories, lots of unusual things happened. I wouldn’t have given a million dollars to have.
MRS. BENNETT: We were real privileged group.
MRS. CHRISTIE: I’ve always said, if I could choose the era that I have lived in, it would be this one. We saw so much and lived through so much that I remember, when the war was going on and I was at USED and they had these big maps up on the wall and they would say, take a city or town or something and would put a colored pin up there, and if we lost one, they would take that pin down. And everybody was, they were anxious. Still did what we had to do.
MR. KILEY: You had something that you were going through together.
MRS. BENNETT: Right. We were a close city. We stayed that way, still today.
MRS. GILLESPIE: I think it was because all came as teenagers, in our particular case, came as teenagers and all formed friendships. Many people came who were already grown, but we were still leaning on each other. Talking about it frequently; going back home and my dad used to say, “Sara, we’re not going back home. This is it.” But you know up until he said that for about five years, we said, we thought about going back home. And we’d go back home to their reunions and I was glad of course, but everybody did have that feeling, that we were temporary. This was going to be a temporary city.
MRS. BENNETT: But we are all very loyal Oak Ridgers – I’m sure you notice that we’ll fight at the drop of a hat.
MR. KILEY: What was it like, what memories do you have of the opening of the gates? Maybe the build-up to the event itself. What do you remember about that?
MRS. CHRISTIE: Actually, I don’t remember a lot about that. I know I was in Jackson Square.
I was at the gate, too, at Jackson Square, but it’s kind of vague in my mind.
MRS. BENNETT: And actually, we didn’t even want the gates to be open.
MRS. CHRISTIE: We didn’t want the gates to be open anyway. We liked it as it was.
MR. KILEY: What did you like about it?
MRS. CHRISTIE: It kept us safe. You felt safe.
MRS. BENNETT: Well, we didn’t have unsafe to compare it with; but we just felt like we were a close knit group.
MRS. CHRISTIE: Sara probably remembers more about the opening of the gate.
MRS. GILLESPIE: I was in Jackson Square when the parade, and of course, I remember everybody – Marie MacDonald, and Jack Bailey from Queen for a Day, and Adele Jergens, and Alben Barkley and Rod Cameron rode a white horse through town.
MRS. BENNETT: On the Alexander Hotel Front porch he rode that horse across there.
MR. KILEY: Across the porch?
MRS. GILLESPIE: And then we went to, second we went to Elza Gate, didn’t we? Oak Ridge High School Band was in the parade, and they we went to Elza Gate and they lit the magnesium ribbon and everybody jumped back because none of us knew they were going to do that. And this ribbon was part of the ribbon that was cut – that was across – I found it in my scrapbook. But it was just a really, really big day. Just because we were kind of sheltered in that sense, we hadn’t seen that many movie stars in Oak Ridge, and they were dressed to the hilt. They were beautiful. Every one of them.
MRS. CHRISTIE: And Adolphe Menjou..
MRS. BENNETT: Well, I can remember Rod Cameron because I was very much in love with him and I didn’t get to touch him or that horse.
MRS. CHRISTIE: I remember back in the original Atomic Blonde was supposed to have been Ann Sheridan who was at that time my favorite movie star. But that didn’t work out. And I guess I was a little mad…But we got to watch them, we were a part of.
MRS. BENNETT: I think we were a little too young to know the significance of the event.
MRS. GILLESPIE: After the festivities we got we all went to Blankenship Field where the football field is, Blankenship, and Alben Barkley and all these dignitaries sat on the platform and made speeches. And that’s about all I can remember. I just know that it was a really, really big day. And that I enjoyed it. You know we didn’t have television, so we listened to Jack Benny and Queen for a Day and that kind of program. So it was a big deal. They went to a lot of trouble to bring in, to make this a big deal for us.
MRS. BENNETT: We knew we were very, very special. And of course, when the war ended we finally found out why we were here.
MR. KILEY: What was that like to finally find out what had been going on all those years?
MRS. CHRISTIE: Well, I was working at the time as Head of the Outgoing Mail Department and I was on call for, I was always on call. So they called me at home and said, “Stay ready, we may have some work to do.” There was, I don’t know how many others, like the Sandia Base, places like government places, but the next morning when I came in I had stacks and stacks and stacks of secret, atomic stuff like that to send out to these different bases. It was that night then that I found out what we’d been doing all along. And you could hear tales, like, they’re making yoyos, or paper dolls, or things like that.
MRS. BENNETT: Well, I was just a little bit younger, but caught up in the excitement of it. I was elated that the war was over.
MRS. GILLESPIE: D-day, made this famous picture and Aileen [Bennett] is in the middle of this picture. And about 100 other people are.
MRS. CHRISTIE: Got plastered all over-
MRS. GILLESPIE: It’s in every book about Oak Ridge, it’s everywhere.
MRS. BENNETT: And I was in, I lived in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and I started doing genealogy, and I went down to the library and I said, “Oh there’s a book on Oak Ridge”. And I opened it, and there that picture is, and I said, “I’m in history already”.
MRS. GILLESPIE: What a star you are!
MRS. BENNETT: I don’t know how I even got to go down there by myself. I didn’t see my mother anyplace around.
MRS. CHRISTIE: It’s a beautiful place to live.
MRS. BENNETT: Always has been.
MRS. GILLESPIE: I left in ‘49 and came back in ‘64 and raised a family here.
MR. KILEY: What was it like coming back here in ‘64 after-
MRS. GILLESPIE: It certainly was different. I didn’t have any money when I left and came back with my husband and four children, and now I have 9 grandchildren.
MR. KILEY: What difference did you see in the City – the way it felt and what was going on?
MRS. GILLESPIE: Well, we had a brand new home to move into and we were not allowed to build private homes back then. Until about 1951. When they sold the cemestos and flattops and moved a lot of the flattops away. Our house went to Paducah, Kentucky, I know, because my mother-
MRS. BENNETT: It was moved to Paducah?
MRS. GILLESPIE: Yes, she took the number off the side of the house so if she ever saw it again, she could find it.
MRS. BENNETT: Could they tear the houses down and moved them places?
MRS. GILLESPIE: They did, they took all the flattops off East Drive and moved them. And now they have a different kind of house up there. But the end of Oak Ridge, I used to say Oak Ridge was 10 miles long, 3 miles wide and then they started building the private homes. Louisiana was no longer the end of Oak Ridge. There must be at least 5 or 6 miles beyond Louisiana now into Roane County. But it used to stop at Louisiana, and that’s where the Peach Orchard was. Where the Girl Scout Camp was, that was the end of nowhere, you know.
MRS. BENNETT: I lived away also; we moved away in 1963, but we came back to visit, and every time we came back to visit they’d have to put us in the car and drive us all around where the new houses and everything was built. It really didn’t look a lot like Oak Ridge.
MRS. CHRISTIE: I only lived here for about 3 months. And I lived in Los Alamos New Mexico, with the government.
MRS. BENNETT: She’s just a government child.
MR. KILEY: What memories to you have of the Museum, the first time you came to the Museum, what kinds of exhibits, what memories do you have?
MRS. BENNETT: Well, I worked at the old Museum, when it was at Jefferson.
MR. KILEY: Oh, you actually worked at the Museum
MRS. BENNETT: Yes, I was an employee.
MR. KILEY: What years would that be?
MRS. BENNETT: Let me see – in the late 50s, no it was earlier than that. Maybe about ‘56 or 7, it was very interesting working down there. I didn’t get around to see all of it because I was very busy at the time working.
MR. KILEY: What job did you do?
MRS. BENNETT: I worked for Dewey Large and he more or less worked in the public relations area. We sent out a lot of mail. In fact, that was the first time I had ever seen a Dictaphone machine in my life. The first day of work, he said, “I’m leaving. I’m going out of town and there’s about 50 letters on the Dictaphone machine.” And I said, “OK,” but I didn’t realize you could stop and back it up. So I tried to type real fast. And I said, I will never keep this job. I thought that this was ridiculous; there has got to be a way that you can stop this machine. So I fiddled with it and found out how to work it. I thought I won’t last in this job; I can’t type that fast. That was a fun job. Of course, we had a lot of visitors come through and all the time, and that was where they had the…
MRS. GILLESPIE: It was called the Atomic Energy Museum, and when it moved it was called the American Museum of Science and Energy, with lots of emphasis on science and energy and not atomic museum. It was very different from the old Museum and this Museum.
MR. KILEY: Tell me about the old Museum.
MRS. GILLESPIE: The old museum I remember as a child seeing pictures of peoples bones the ones who had painted faces on watches. And put the paint brush in their mouth to make a point on the brush to make the paint the faces with radium paint. And it was absorbed into their bones and they died of leukemia. And that kind of thing. That’s one thing I remember. It got your attention right away when you walk in and see all these things. It’s pretty shocking. But it did get our attention. And then you could have a dime irradiated for a souvenir. It was just a little blue holder and you put a dime in this machine, and they said it irradiated it. And then they put it in the holder for you. I don’t have one anymore, but that’s what they did. Took you thru the Museum and explained a lot; they had arms that, Marie MacDonald had her cigarette lit by the arms that you had to reach thru.
MRS. CHRISTIE: That’s the one that lit Marie MacDonald’s cigarette? At the time it was OK to smoke.
MRS. GILLESPIE: When they worked with radiation, it was the mechanical arms handled radioactive material. It was a very nice Museum, not nearly the size of the one now. But they did do a lot of things there that they don’t do here.
MR. KILEY: What kinds of things did they do that you remember?
MRS. GILLESPIE: Well, it seems like they had so many maps and things that I had never seen in this Museum having any reason to have. The technical part of it, I don’t know if they had some kind of relationship with TVA, or what it was, but I can’t explain what they had.
Really interesting place to live. Absolutely. Fabulous.
MR. KILEY: On the occasion of the anniversary of the opening of the gates, did you perceive any difference about Oak Ridge in the immediate period after they opened the gates, any change after they opened the gates or was that more symbolic?
MRS. CHRISTIE: Did you know that a lot of people didn’t even know where Oak Ridge was? It wasn’t on the map. Wasn’t supposed to be on the map. And you know, they thought we’ll have a lot of visitors come in, but they didn’t because they evidently read too much about it, because they didn’t realize they could get in without a badge.
MRS. BENNETT: They probably still thought of it as the Secret City, probably afraid to come over and see us.
MRS. GILLESPIE: There were signs everywhere about keeping your mouth zipped. And they changed the giant sign every so often when you went outside of Oak Ridge. Remember that big sign. They always had a little ditty on it, a little poem.
MRS. BENNETT: And the three monkeys.
MRS. GILLESPIE: Yes, and always the same thing, and they always were changing it. And there were rumors that spies came in. Remember. Spies jumped off the train coming out of the tunnel behind my house, that’s what the rumor was.
MR. KILEY: Well I’d like to thank you all for taking the time to talk to us. This has been delightful.

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ORAL HISTORY OF SARA GILLESPIE, AILEEN BENNETT, AND BETTY CHRISTIE
Interviewed by Dennis Kiley
March 19, 1999
MR. KILEY: This is Dennis Kiley, it’s March 19, 1999, and I’m here at the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the opening of the gates in Oak Ridge at the American Museum of Science and Energy. And if you ladies would be so kind as to introduce yourselves, from left to right please.
MRS. CHRISTIE: Betty Ridings Christie
MRS. BENNETT: Aileen Ridings Bennett
MRS. GILLESPIE: Sara Boyd Gillespie
MR. KILEY: Actually, you might want to start by talking about how you came to Oak Ridge. What was it – because of family work? Why and when did you first come to Oak Ridge.
MRS. CHRISTIE: Well, our dad was a construction worker and worked all around, and this big project was going to start. They took his application off a running board of a car in Knoxville in November of 1942. That’s how come us to be here.
MRS. BENNETT: And he was the second carpenter hired for this project out here. And there were seven – nine of us including our parents, and as she said, we had to move to Clinton because we didn’t have a house in Oak Ridge. Then as she said she worked for USED [United States Engineering Detachment] and she got us a house to live in in Oak Ridge. When we first moved here we lived in a B house, and there were 13 of us in that B house, and that was real interesting.
MR. KILEY: Sara?
MRS. GILLESPIE: Well my dad worked for the Milan Arsenal, which is in West Tennessee and things were pretty slow - five children. He and his brother heard about the work in Oak Ridge so they decided to come up here in the spring of ’44. He thought it was a good place and a good time to move us so he moved us up. We arrived August 30, 1944 with no beds, no furniture. The neighbors helped us with blankets and we slept on the floor that night. It was nice and warm. A good thing was we moved into a flattop that was already built, and the next morning we saw our neighbors’ houses being built, because they came in on flatbed trucks, 1/3 of the house at a time - with the shower curtain already hanging. My youngest sister was 8 months old and I was 12, and that’s how we got here. Came to Rockwood on the train, got off the train, my dad had a car to meet us there and we came to the gates, finally got in and got settled late at night.
MR. KILEY: So how did you get your family on in Oak Ridge from living in the house in Clinton, how did that go?
MRS. BENNETT: I’m sure daddy got a truck.
MRS. CHRISTIE: Daddy always moved us, he just got a truck. We came over; my aunt brought all of us over to the house he had rented that night. We stopped between Loudon and Oak Ridge and asked directions from some man that gave us directions to go to Chattanooga. We did finally get here though.
MRS. BENNETT: But I remember stopping at the overlook, remember - stopping there, we got out and looked and you could just see all of Oak Ridge.
MRS. CHRISTIE: Because it was busy then, they were working 24 hours a day, they didn’t close. And it was real busy and lights were on all over
MR. KILEY: So when your family first came here you were living in Clinton but then because you had a job here you were able to get – how did you go about getting family accommodations here in Oak Ridge?
MRS. BENNETT: Going thru the Captain?
MR. KILEY: Yes.
MRS. BENNETT: Well, as I say, five people working in the same family on this project. And it was just a drop in the bucket because of all the people that were here. But five people was five people. And he just explained to the housing director that there were five people that he was going to lose if we couldn’t find suitable housing because there was nothing to rent – absolutely nothing. So I guess he bent the rules a little bit and we got in. Because construction workers didn’t – they were not eligible for the housing. I had a brother in law who was in the service and that helped matters a lot.
MR. KILEY: So the first dwelling that you went to was --
MRS. CHRISTIE: A “B” house
MR. KILEY: A “B” house, was that big enough for all of you?
MRS. CHRISTIE: Not for thirteen people, it wasn’t. So I went back to him and told him, and I told him, look there’s thirteen of us and this house is just a bit small. So we went back to the housing director and he put us in a bigger house. And we had several people live with us even after we moved into the bigger house. My cousin lived with us for quite some time and you know, just relatives that--
MRS. BENNETT: Anybody that didn’t have a place to sleep.
MRS. CHRISTIE: Came to our house
MR. KILEY: What was it like living in a flat top, Sara? You mentioned that it was--
MRS. GILLESPIE: Well, actually to me it was pretty crude, but it served a purpose. There was no underpinning of the house when we first moved in, so my dad put some siding on the underpinning. I remember one time my sisters went under the house and smoked rabbit tobacco and my husband caught them with all this wooden stuff, everything was wooden. But anyway, it was a wonderful life growing up on East Drive. I moved there when I was 12, left when I was 17, and we could climb under the fence which completely surrounded Oak Ridge and we would see occasionally the man on horseback patrolling. There was a big train tunnel behind our house and we’ve been known to go inside the tunnel which we weren’t supposed to do. But go down in the woods and pick blackberries. Or go down in the woods and cut down a Christmas tree for that matter.
MRS. CHRISTIE: We used to go down “G” road and cut Christmas trees,
MRS. GILLESPIE: Right, and go down “G” Road where the houses, where the farmers used to live and beautiful flowers would bloom every season, and dig up flowers and take them back to our house. It was a wonderful place to grow up. Everything was free. My brother took free music lessons; he never owned the cello, but when he went to college he played cello; taught cello in fact. It was all because of all the training we got here. So different…
MRS. BENNETT: Excellent schools..
MRS. CHRISTIE: They tried to provide all the entertainment that any person could possibly want. They built bowling alleys, they had dances, and it was just a wonderful town to grow up in. Even though I was 18.
MRS. BENNETT: It was sad because of the war but Oak Ridge was just a wonderful place for a young person. Especially, there were no classes as far as financial or what have you. We were all here and we were all on the same level. It was just great. And I’ve said many times, that while other kids had security blankets, we had security guards. We felt very safe.
MRS. CHRISTIE: We did; we never locked the doors, you didn’t lock the doors. It wasn’t necessary.
MRS. BENNETT: And you could hear a lot of moms say, “don’t go off the area!”
MRS. GILLESPIE: You all were talking about the school system. My mother said she was so glad that they had the foresight to stay in Oak Ridge after they got here. And this is bragging, but it’s true – they didn’t have the money to send us through school, but they got such a wonderful background in school here, my brother and my sister both got their doctorates and everyone but me got at least a Master’s degree and all on their own, and just because of the background in Oak Ridge schools. When my husband first went to Oak Ridge High School once he said. “I couldn’t believe it. All the kids have a microscope.” And each of us didn’t have a microscope in Berea. And that’s true. Everything was furnished. They even painted the school rooms every year whether they needed it or not. And we had free recreation halls, free playgrounds, so it really added so much. It didn’t come out of my parent’s pocket; it came out of the government’s pocket to keep us happy. They say there was 700 PhDs living here and I’m sure out of 70,000 there were at one time. And they demanded good schools, good everything. So we had a bus service back then, 6 cents a token.
MRS. BENNETT: Right and all of our services as far as the coal bins which were just right outside our door. They would deliver coal.
MRS. CHRISTIE: and if anything happened at your house and you needed it repaired, you called.
MRS. GILLESPIE: Come change a light bulb at the very beginning. We were told to do that.
I remember I babysat for the Army, like the manager of Oak Ridge, but he was in the Army still before the Army left Oak Ridge. His name was Bill Bonnet and one night I was over there babysitting and my mother said, “Make sure you tell them that you can’t stay up, you can’t stay up late because you can’t stay awake.” Well they didn’t come home until about 2 in the morning and I was sound asleep. They couldn’t get in. He had on a white summer suit and he climbed into the coal bin to get in the door. We joked, but he didn’t do it again because I couldn’t wake up. But those were some of the fun things. Coal bins, and everybody had oil to burn in that stove in the middle of the room of the flattop. Seems like we went someplace to get five gallons of oil. And then we moved to a place where we burned coal and had a coal bin.
MRS. BENNETT: We had a fireplace in the den.
MRS. CHRISTIE: But after we were married we lived in a flat top and it had a potbellied stove sitting right in the living room. My husband, being from the north, he would put coal in you know, and leave the door open, and of course it would just burn, and you could see it. One morning he had gone to work and I looked out and the fire trucks were all parked in front of the house, you know, I got out looking to see where the fire was, and they never did find it, and it finally dawned on me. The flat top had a big window in the front; they could see my fire in that stove and somebody had called the fire trucks.
MR. KILEY: So you came, you were 18, already graduated from school, so you went to work, where did you work?
MRS. CHRISTIE: Here in Oak Ridge.
MR. KILEY: Where?
MRS. CHRISTIE: In the mail room, mail and records
MR. KILEY: And what part of the..
MRS. CHRISTIE: First I worked as a messenger, and then I worked in the file room and then I worked as head of the outgoing mail department.
MRS. BENNETT: What did USED stand for?
MRS. CHRISTIE: United States Engineering Detachment.
MRS. GILLESPIE: Were you working for the Army?
MRS. CHRISTIE: Not the Army, and I really don’t know how to explain it, but it was the Army part of this project. The engineering part.
MRS. GILLESPIE: And there were a lot of people who came here with the Army and stayed here.
MRS. CHRISTIE: Yes.
MRS. GILLESPIE: A lot of people met their husbands here too.
MR. KILEY: As young women here in Oak Ridge, what kinds of things did you do to entertain yourselves?
MRS. GILLESPIE: I belonged to the Girl Scouts, and they had so many recreation centers, and they had all kinds of courses that helped me a great deal.
MRS. CHRISTIE: They had dances on the tennis courts on Saturday nights, and they had dances at the--
MRS. GILLESPIE: Movies, bowling
MRS. BENNETT: And during the summer they had a recreational program at each school and the neighborhood kids participated and they were supervised and everything, and we had of course softball, and we would play against each other and other schools, there was just always something to do. They always had some program, something going on. We certainly couldn’t sit around the house and say we were bored. Everybody went to the swimming pool; that was THE place to go.
MRS. GILLESPIE: It was fed by a spring in the beginning, don’t know whether it still is or not. But it was back then.
MRS. BENNETT: But, of course, we had the Wildcats Den.
MRS. GILLESPIE: They didn’t deny us anything that we needed.
MR. KILEY: Wildcats?
MRS. BENNETT: Wildcats Den – it was a place in Jackson Square where all the high school kids got in. And we’d see how fast we could get from the school on the hill where we had how many steps to climb? To the high school.
MRS. BENNETT: We had lots of them. We’d see how fast we could get from the high school down to the Wildcats Den.
MRS. CHRISTIE: Jackson Square area used to be what we called Townsite and that was the hub of everything. And the central cafeteria was right in the center of it. It was open 24 hours a day and if you got off at 7 p.m. at night you could go over and have coffee, and there was always somebody over there you knew. Everybody found enough to do to keep them busy.
MRS. BENNETT: I remember the day after we moved here, my brother said, “Let’s walk to Townsite.” We lived up on Outer Drive. And it took us a while to get there, thru mud and snow, it had been snowing. We walked all the way down there. And I have to tell you something really funny. We had a nickel between us. And so we went into the grocery store – they had a grocery store at Jackson Square – he says, “What can we buy with this nickel?” So we went thru the store and looked, and we saw this cake of yogurt. And if you knew my brother, he was a practical joker of all times, he said, “Hey look at the big cake of candy or something.” And I said, “Yeah,” and it was a nickel or something. He said, “Here you can have the first bite.” I bit into that cake; it was a cake of yeast, not yogurt. But we walked all the way down there and all the way home. We walked a lot in Oak Ridge. Of course, we had bus service, but it seemed like--
MRS. CHRISTIE: It was easy to walk
MRS. GILLESPIE: You know something else we were not deprived of - concerts and that kind of thing. Estes Keefauver came here, I think it was in ’47, Senator Estes Keefauver. And anybody could go hear him that wanted to, and I remember because I was one of the ushers. My friend was one of the people who sponsored him, and so she asked me if I could please, usher at the high school, because everybody could find their own seat, but it was, but it showed us off in our evening gowns. But I also remember we had Sigmund Spaeth came here one time, very famous person in classical music. But we weren’t deprived of anything. In high school remember we had H. V. Kaltenborn who came here, and he was a very famous person. We need to talk about schools.
MR. KILEY: True.
MRS. GILLESPIE: Douglas Edwards’ mother was a teacher here, remember, Mrs. Edwards. He was as big as Tom Brokaw is now. Teachers came from all over the US. I’ve just done a study for our reunion where they came from and they came from every state. Actually more from other states than Tennessee. And they were some hand-picked and because they wanted the best. Absolutely fabulous teachers. Would compare on any college level. That has also leaked over to our athletic programs because in Oak Ridge we have feeder programs in the Boys Club and Girls Club and this is the reason we have won so many state championships.
MRS. CHRISTIE: I went to the first football game,
MR. KILEY: Who did they play?
MRS. CHRISTIE: Don’t even remember – that was so many years ago. An awful lot of mud, though.
MR. KILEY: Not much grass out there.
MRS. GILLESPIE: No, the streets weren’t even paved that well when we first came.
MRS. CHRISTIE: We had boardwalks, we didn’t have sidewalks.
MRS. GILLESPIE: The street also, there was some kind of first layer that you start putting down, my husband told me what it was, but in the very earliest years we did not have real heavy asphalt roads like they do now, cause it was so many to be put down and there was 70,000 plus when we were here. I guess it is about 30,000 now.
MRS. CHRISTIE: But the road that you came in on, Elza Gate, was not paved, and it was mud up to your knees.
MRS. BENNETT: Tell that story about your sister in law that came to visit.
MRS. CHRISTIE: Well, she came from Pennsylvania to visit, and as she stepped off the bus her foot went into the mud and she lost her shoe. She took the other one off and threw it.
MRS. GILLESPIE: Rosie Eby came with her daughter when her daughter was 3 and she got off the train, and we did not have a train station, they just stopped the train out there in the middle of nowhere, down at Elza Gate, and they got off the train. They just stopped it; we didn’t have a station until later.
MRS. CHRISTIE: We rode busses, and some of them were those you know where there are two, one hooked onto the back and we’d catch one at night and go into Knoxville to shop.
MRS. BENNETT: And we could not wait to get our badge; until we were old enough to get our badge.
MR. KILEY: That was a real important part of growing up.
MRS. BENNETT: Oh, yes, you went down there the day of your birthday to get your badge.
MR. KILEY: Kind of like getting your driver’s license.
MRS. BENNETT: Yes, it sure was and I remember our grandparents still lived in Lenoir City or Loudon and we’d go visit them, and naturally one of us would lose our badge or leave it there. So our mother would say, just act like you’re asleep because they’re not going to wake up a child to get thru the gates. So that’s how we got back in.
MR. KILEY: What was it like going thru the gates to leave or to come back? What kinds of things did you have to go through?
MRS. BENNETT: You just had to show your badge and they checked out your car and
MRS. GILLESPIE: If you had company, your dad or somebody had to be responsible to sign for them that he would be responsible, and they had no cameras, no guns, and no liquor, none of these things that you weren’t supposed to have. This was a dry county.
MRS. BENNETT: It sure was.
MRS. GILLESPIE: I mean, I happen to know a funny story and you may have heard it. All these people went to Knoxville and came back with baby bassinet loaded underneath the baby was all this liquor. And this is a true story.
MRS. BENNETT: And the famous white house outside Oliver Springs gate, remember that, that little white house; that’s where everybody went to get their booze, I’m told.
MRS. GILLESPIE: A lot of people didn’t bother them that this was a dry county. Lots of funny stories, lots of unusual things happened. I wouldn’t have given a million dollars to have.
MRS. BENNETT: We were real privileged group.
MRS. CHRISTIE: I’ve always said, if I could choose the era that I have lived in, it would be this one. We saw so much and lived through so much that I remember, when the war was going on and I was at USED and they had these big maps up on the wall and they would say, take a city or town or something and would put a colored pin up there, and if we lost one, they would take that pin down. And everybody was, they were anxious. Still did what we had to do.
MR. KILEY: You had something that you were going through together.
MRS. BENNETT: Right. We were a close city. We stayed that way, still today.
MRS. GILLESPIE: I think it was because all came as teenagers, in our particular case, came as teenagers and all formed friendships. Many people came who were already grown, but we were still leaning on each other. Talking about it frequently; going back home and my dad used to say, “Sara, we’re not going back home. This is it.” But you know up until he said that for about five years, we said, we thought about going back home. And we’d go back home to their reunions and I was glad of course, but everybody did have that feeling, that we were temporary. This was going to be a temporary city.
MRS. BENNETT: But we are all very loyal Oak Ridgers – I’m sure you notice that we’ll fight at the drop of a hat.
MR. KILEY: What was it like, what memories do you have of the opening of the gates? Maybe the build-up to the event itself. What do you remember about that?
MRS. CHRISTIE: Actually, I don’t remember a lot about that. I know I was in Jackson Square.
I was at the gate, too, at Jackson Square, but it’s kind of vague in my mind.
MRS. BENNETT: And actually, we didn’t even want the gates to be open.
MRS. CHRISTIE: We didn’t want the gates to be open anyway. We liked it as it was.
MR. KILEY: What did you like about it?
MRS. CHRISTIE: It kept us safe. You felt safe.
MRS. BENNETT: Well, we didn’t have unsafe to compare it with; but we just felt like we were a close knit group.
MRS. CHRISTIE: Sara probably remembers more about the opening of the gate.
MRS. GILLESPIE: I was in Jackson Square when the parade, and of course, I remember everybody – Marie MacDonald, and Jack Bailey from Queen for a Day, and Adele Jergens, and Alben Barkley and Rod Cameron rode a white horse through town.
MRS. BENNETT: On the Alexander Hotel Front porch he rode that horse across there.
MR. KILEY: Across the porch?
MRS. GILLESPIE: And then we went to, second we went to Elza Gate, didn’t we? Oak Ridge High School Band was in the parade, and they we went to Elza Gate and they lit the magnesium ribbon and everybody jumped back because none of us knew they were going to do that. And this ribbon was part of the ribbon that was cut – that was across – I found it in my scrapbook. But it was just a really, really big day. Just because we were kind of sheltered in that sense, we hadn’t seen that many movie stars in Oak Ridge, and they were dressed to the hilt. They were beautiful. Every one of them.
MRS. CHRISTIE: And Adolphe Menjou..
MRS. BENNETT: Well, I can remember Rod Cameron because I was very much in love with him and I didn’t get to touch him or that horse.
MRS. CHRISTIE: I remember back in the original Atomic Blonde was supposed to have been Ann Sheridan who was at that time my favorite movie star. But that didn’t work out. And I guess I was a little mad…But we got to watch them, we were a part of.
MRS. BENNETT: I think we were a little too young to know the significance of the event.
MRS. GILLESPIE: After the festivities we got we all went to Blankenship Field where the football field is, Blankenship, and Alben Barkley and all these dignitaries sat on the platform and made speeches. And that’s about all I can remember. I just know that it was a really, really big day. And that I enjoyed it. You know we didn’t have television, so we listened to Jack Benny and Queen for a Day and that kind of program. So it was a big deal. They went to a lot of trouble to bring in, to make this a big deal for us.
MRS. BENNETT: We knew we were very, very special. And of course, when the war ended we finally found out why we were here.
MR. KILEY: What was that like to finally find out what had been going on all those years?
MRS. CHRISTIE: Well, I was working at the time as Head of the Outgoing Mail Department and I was on call for, I was always on call. So they called me at home and said, “Stay ready, we may have some work to do.” There was, I don’t know how many others, like the Sandia Base, places like government places, but the next morning when I came in I had stacks and stacks and stacks of secret, atomic stuff like that to send out to these different bases. It was that night then that I found out what we’d been doing all along. And you could hear tales, like, they’re making yoyos, or paper dolls, or things like that.
MRS. BENNETT: Well, I was just a little bit younger, but caught up in the excitement of it. I was elated that the war was over.
MRS. GILLESPIE: D-day, made this famous picture and Aileen [Bennett] is in the middle of this picture. And about 100 other people are.
MRS. CHRISTIE: Got plastered all over-
MRS. GILLESPIE: It’s in every book about Oak Ridge, it’s everywhere.
MRS. BENNETT: And I was in, I lived in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and I started doing genealogy, and I went down to the library and I said, “Oh there’s a book on Oak Ridge”. And I opened it, and there that picture is, and I said, “I’m in history already”.
MRS. GILLESPIE: What a star you are!
MRS. BENNETT: I don’t know how I even got to go down there by myself. I didn’t see my mother anyplace around.
MRS. CHRISTIE: It’s a beautiful place to live.
MRS. BENNETT: Always has been.
MRS. GILLESPIE: I left in ‘49 and came back in ‘64 and raised a family here.
MR. KILEY: What was it like coming back here in ‘64 after-
MRS. GILLESPIE: It certainly was different. I didn’t have any money when I left and came back with my husband and four children, and now I have 9 grandchildren.
MR. KILEY: What difference did you see in the City – the way it felt and what was going on?
MRS. GILLESPIE: Well, we had a brand new home to move into and we were not allowed to build private homes back then. Until about 1951. When they sold the cemestos and flattops and moved a lot of the flattops away. Our house went to Paducah, Kentucky, I know, because my mother-
MRS. BENNETT: It was moved to Paducah?
MRS. GILLESPIE: Yes, she took the number off the side of the house so if she ever saw it again, she could find it.
MRS. BENNETT: Could they tear the houses down and moved them places?
MRS. GILLESPIE: They did, they took all the flattops off East Drive and moved them. And now they have a different kind of house up there. But the end of Oak Ridge, I used to say Oak Ridge was 10 miles long, 3 miles wide and then they started building the private homes. Louisiana was no longer the end of Oak Ridge. There must be at least 5 or 6 miles beyond Louisiana now into Roane County. But it used to stop at Louisiana, and that’s where the Peach Orchard was. Where the Girl Scout Camp was, that was the end of nowhere, you know.
MRS. BENNETT: I lived away also; we moved away in 1963, but we came back to visit, and every time we came back to visit they’d have to put us in the car and drive us all around where the new houses and everything was built. It really didn’t look a lot like Oak Ridge.
MRS. CHRISTIE: I only lived here for about 3 months. And I lived in Los Alamos New Mexico, with the government.
MRS. BENNETT: She’s just a government child.
MR. KILEY: What memories to you have of the Museum, the first time you came to the Museum, what kinds of exhibits, what memories do you have?
MRS. BENNETT: Well, I worked at the old Museum, when it was at Jefferson.
MR. KILEY: Oh, you actually worked at the Museum
MRS. BENNETT: Yes, I was an employee.
MR. KILEY: What years would that be?
MRS. BENNETT: Let me see – in the late 50s, no it was earlier than that. Maybe about ‘56 or 7, it was very interesting working down there. I didn’t get around to see all of it because I was very busy at the time working.
MR. KILEY: What job did you do?
MRS. BENNETT: I worked for Dewey Large and he more or less worked in the public relations area. We sent out a lot of mail. In fact, that was the first time I had ever seen a Dictaphone machine in my life. The first day of work, he said, “I’m leaving. I’m going out of town and there’s about 50 letters on the Dictaphone machine.” And I said, “OK,” but I didn’t realize you could stop and back it up. So I tried to type real fast. And I said, I will never keep this job. I thought that this was ridiculous; there has got to be a way that you can stop this machine. So I fiddled with it and found out how to work it. I thought I won’t last in this job; I can’t type that fast. That was a fun job. Of course, we had a lot of visitors come through and all the time, and that was where they had the…
MRS. GILLESPIE: It was called the Atomic Energy Museum, and when it moved it was called the American Museum of Science and Energy, with lots of emphasis on science and energy and not atomic museum. It was very different from the old Museum and this Museum.
MR. KILEY: Tell me about the old Museum.
MRS. GILLESPIE: The old museum I remember as a child seeing pictures of peoples bones the ones who had painted faces on watches. And put the paint brush in their mouth to make a point on the brush to make the paint the faces with radium paint. And it was absorbed into their bones and they died of leukemia. And that kind of thing. That’s one thing I remember. It got your attention right away when you walk in and see all these things. It’s pretty shocking. But it did get our attention. And then you could have a dime irradiated for a souvenir. It was just a little blue holder and you put a dime in this machine, and they said it irradiated it. And then they put it in the holder for you. I don’t have one anymore, but that’s what they did. Took you thru the Museum and explained a lot; they had arms that, Marie MacDonald had her cigarette lit by the arms that you had to reach thru.
MRS. CHRISTIE: That’s the one that lit Marie MacDonald’s cigarette? At the time it was OK to smoke.
MRS. GILLESPIE: When they worked with radiation, it was the mechanical arms handled radioactive material. It was a very nice Museum, not nearly the size of the one now. But they did do a lot of things there that they don’t do here.
MR. KILEY: What kinds of things did they do that you remember?
MRS. GILLESPIE: Well, it seems like they had so many maps and things that I had never seen in this Museum having any reason to have. The technical part of it, I don’t know if they had some kind of relationship with TVA, or what it was, but I can’t explain what they had.
Really interesting place to live. Absolutely. Fabulous.
MR. KILEY: On the occasion of the anniversary of the opening of the gates, did you perceive any difference about Oak Ridge in the immediate period after they opened the gates, any change after they opened the gates or was that more symbolic?
MRS. CHRISTIE: Did you know that a lot of people didn’t even know where Oak Ridge was? It wasn’t on the map. Wasn’t supposed to be on the map. And you know, they thought we’ll have a lot of visitors come in, but they didn’t because they evidently read too much about it, because they didn’t realize they could get in without a badge.
MRS. BENNETT: They probably still thought of it as the Secret City, probably afraid to come over and see us.
MRS. GILLESPIE: There were signs everywhere about keeping your mouth zipped. And they changed the giant sign every so often when you went outside of Oak Ridge. Remember that big sign. They always had a little ditty on it, a little poem.
MRS. BENNETT: And the three monkeys.
MRS. GILLESPIE: Yes, and always the same thing, and they always were changing it. And there were rumors that spies came in. Remember. Spies jumped off the train coming out of the tunnel behind my house, that’s what the rumor was.
MR. KILEY: Well I’d like to thank you all for taking the time to talk to us. This has been delightful.